Kenny Fell off a Ladder

Kenny is one of Grandma Celeste’s six children, her eldest. Late forties. He’d make the trip from northern California and visit the family once a month or so, sometimes more. He makes good money working dispatch for DHL and often helps his mother out financially.
 
Kenny is a bear, in the Urban Dictionary sense, not the Disney sense–bearded, roomy in the belly, gay. He was the very first person to be legally married to another man in his county–a flamboyant, defiantly sexual painter / performance artist / art institute faculty member (think Mapplethorpe, but in color). Made the news. Kenny has a good heart. Cultured, unassuming, infectiously enthusiastic, interesting.
 
 

 

I just finished watching 127 Hours with Maryanne. Not exactly relaxing weekend fair. Scream? Pffft. Saw? Pffft. Lemme tell ya folks: There is nothing as terrifying as reality. Everybody, everybody and their Springer Spaniel told me about what happens in that flick. They tell you what happens before they tell you what it’s about. And I still wasn’t completely ready for The Thing That Happens. Here I am, sharing a movie with a 92-year-old great-great grandmother. I’m squirming, wincing, groaning "SHIIIIIIT!" and "SON OF A BITCH!" quite unprofessionally. She stuck with it though, the trooper.
 

 
"Eric, can you help me take the bedspread off my window?"
 
Peggy is the youngest of six. Also a good heart, but the classic definition–I say this with love–of white trash. Living with mom, barfly, messed up teeth–always broke, but seemingly awash with unlimited funds for cigarettes and tattoos up the wazoo. 
 
We have a grudging appreciation for one another. Our senses of humor click, and she takes a lot of my shit with a smile. From the very first day I knew her, she would ask me to do things for her. I’ve often questioned the validity of her requests, even keeping in mind that she, like Randall (her nephew and my actual charge), has muscular dystrophy (as a girl she actually was in one of Jerry Lewis’ commercials). So, I have to differentiate things that she’d never be able to accomplish herself and those things that she could accomplish, easily in fact, but was too damn lazy to get off her rapidly expanding tush to execute.
 
"I can’t stand on my bed, you know. Don’t wanna fall."
 
"Alright, Peg. I’ll be on it in a sec."
 
"Kenny’s gonna put on some curtains, and I wanna take it off. And I’d do it myself, but I can’t stand on my bed, so…"
 
She’ll keep like this until you either do what she wants or blow your brains out with a 12-gauge.
 
"If Kenny’s gonna put up the curtains, couldn’t he just take off the blanket himself?" I asked.
 
"He wanted me to do it."
 
I just stared at her for a moment while I tried to process that. Trying to figure out the logic of it made me smell smoke. Peg and Kenny don’t always get along. Kenny plays the role of the family’s savior, Peg resents it, often playing the role of the fuck-up. Kenny is sometimes hard on her with his chiding, but Peg is a loud, cantankerous, argumentative drop of God, so it’s not always easy to take sides. 
 
Went to her room, took care of business. Celeste got a new television, wanted it installed, knocked that out. Started the morning (afternoon) rituals with Randall…
 
Celeste called me to the garage: "Eric, can you take the crutches outside to Kenny? He hurt himself."
 
"Okay," took the crutches, started navigating myself towards the backyard.
 
"ERIC!" This was Sheryl. Longtime boarder, friend of the family, recently beat cancer.
 
"I’m coming!" I shouted, a little perturbed. Can anyone in this family take care of themselves?!
 
"HURRY!"
 
The sliding glass door and screen were completely open. Sheryl was next to Kenny, who looked like he was standing. The step ladder was on its side, the bird bath uprooted out of the dirt, also on its side.
 
"Is he all right?"
 
"NO!"
 
He wasn’t standing. He was propped against a steep, ivy-covered hill, that sloped down into a three-foot concrete wall.
 
He was completely out of it. His eyes were open, his mouth was slack. He was making horrible sucking noises in his throat–something between snoring and a death rattle. His eyes stared right through me.
 
I propped his neck up with one hand and supported his back with the other. He was clammy. I knew something about a fall, but I couldn’t connect it to what I was seeing. Was it a spinal injury? Was he having a heart attack?
 
There was a lot of yelling behind me and I made sure that someone was calling 9-1-1. I held his limp body, and–having watched far too many movies in my life–tried to shout him back to consciousness. The faintest spark of recognition would flicker, but he’d recede and I was…
 
For maybe about five seconds, it occurred to me that there was every possibility that this man could literally die in my arms, and it terrified me. How much death do we witness from the other side of a glass? News, television, movies, theater. To hold it in your arms and to look into fading eyes…
 
I pressed my head against his chest to make sure his heart was beating. Before I could detect anything, I noticed he was breathing. Okay, he’s breathing. I get a CPR refresher once a year and readied my training in the back of my brain (30 compressions, 2 breaths). But he was breathing, so I just stayed with him, and kept yelling at him.
 
"NO! STAY UP, OKAY? YOU GOTTA COME BACK, ALL RIGHT?"
 
I took note of the broken blood vessels on his cheeks. Were they there before? What could happen to a person that he’d suddenly have broken blood vessels on his cheeks?!
 
He shook his head, blinking as if he were trying out a new set of eyes.
 
Sheryl, "How many fingers am I holding up?"
 
"Four," he answered.
 
Good start. Breathing, talking, thinking, making sense.
 
He gradually lifted out of the fog, immediately disappointed that we called 9-1-1.
 
"Aww, man, I don’t want to go to the hospital. I’m fine."
 
"Where does it hurt?" I asked.
 
"My foot hurts, and I hit my knee."
 
Both were streaked purple in areas, but nothing looked too serious.
 
He wasn’t aware that he passed out. Sheryl and I did our best to explain what happened and that he needed to be evaluated by an MD.
 
We got him out of the ivy and sat him on a chair.
 
"Oh, God, I didn’t wet myself, did I?"
 
He was wet in the crouch area, but we accepted that maybe it was from the bird bath–thankfully made of plastic–that broke his fall. I got him a drink of water, Celeste got out a pair of shorts just before the crew arrived but he waved it away.
 
An ambulance and a firetruck. Like eight guys. Stretcher, a large defibrillator, a plastic, orange… plank, I suppose… lemme Internets… Ah, a backboard…
 
Kenny publicly announced that it wasn’t urine on his shorts. That he smelled it and he was sure that it was bird wash.
 
They carted him away, and Celeste and Maryanne went by car to the hospital with Kenny. I told them I’d stay until they returned. 
 
I went back to taking care of Randall assuring him that his uncle was gonna be okay.
 
He kept asking me what happened, and I told him.
 
He kept asking me why Kenny passed out, I kept telling him that it was either from the fall or from the pain.
 
Randall was generally all right with it. He kept going, "Poor Kenny," but aside from the questions there was no indication that he was worried.
 
They came back, just a few minutes after my regular shift. Kenny was relieved that he didn’t suffer a break. He was trying to clear out some branches. He fell, sprained his ankle, and he did in fact pass out from the pain. They gave him an MRI and bandaged his foot, insisting that he get himself checked later just in case there was something more serious to account for his lapse into a grey zone. He had those broken blood vessels before apparently, I just never noticed them.
 
Kenny got on the sofa and elevated his foot, deciding that if he was gonna be grounded it better be in an area that had a television.  I got him some more water, his first drink since the last one I gave him. He was very appreciative for everything I had done through all of this, in spite of my overwhelming feeling that I didn’t really do anything. In fact, the main emotion I maintained was utter dumbfoundedness (not a real word, by the way) at how crazy it all was. It’s too surreal. It doesn’t seem like a real part of our lives. But it is. We are one emergency from an entire universe worth of reality we know absolutely nothing about. It’s awe inspiring how our lives are woven together. And it doesn’t always make sense. And sometimes you find your darkness, and sometimes you find your light. 
 
And the weirdest thing of all? This is my second 9-1-1 situation I’ve personally encountered in less than two weeks…